kweenjaded

For as long as the stars have burned, she has existed. She has been called many names—Gaia, Lilith, the First, the Eternal Witness—but time has eroded meaning, leaving only silence. When the sun finally devoured itself and Earth drifted into the abyss, she closed her eyes, expecting oblivion.

But she did not die.

Eons passed, and Earth—no longer Earth—was reborn in a distant galaxy, reshaped by her unconscious will. Now a training ground for civilizations across the cosmos, the planet teems with life once more. And she, no longer Lilith yet not fully something else, awakens in a body that is hers but unfamiliar. She knows everything yet feels nothing. Memories exist as echoes, not experiences.

When a young explorer, Tilana, stumbles upon her, she is given a name—Lily—a word tied to a flower that no longer exists. As Lily navigates a world both familiar and alien, she must relearn what it means to feel, to connect, and to exist. But something lingers in the depths of this reborn world, something that calls to the remnants of who she was.

To see tomorrow, one must kill yesterday. But what if yesterday refuses to die?.

Lily: The last lily of a forgotten world.

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."

Dr. Caspian Verrian, High Arcanobiologist of the Imperial Xenoarchival Institute, leaned over the analysis console, fingers tightening around the edge of the interface.

Not broken. Not malfunctioning. Processing.

Caspian had spent decades studying anomalies—beings, entities, and remnants of civilizations long consumed by the passage of time. His field, Arcanobiology, was the science of what defied science. Where biology, physics, and the arcane overlapped in ways that shouldn't exist, yet did. He had mapped the genomes of extinct species, decrypted genetic legacies left behind in stone and dust, and categorized anomalies that made even the most advanced technology look primitive.

The small vial of essence—he couldn't even call it blood—had been placed in a containment scanner designed to analyze the most complex lifeforms known to exist. The machine had identified everything from world-forgers to voidwalkers, had cataloged entities whose molecular structures folded across dimensions. It had never hesitated.

A slow pulse ran through the console. The interface flickered.

The data wasn't just unreadable. It was rewriting itself.

The system was adapting—not to an unknown factor, but to something it had seen before.

The numbers aligned for a fraction of a second. A pattern flickered into existence. And for the first time in his life, Caspian saw something that should not be possible.

His hands moved before his mind could process. The console shut down in an instant—wiped clean, purged, the analysis destroyed before it could finish. He didn't know what the machine had started to remember, but if it completed the sequence, if the system logged it, if it transmitted the results to the archives…

His fingers hovered over the emergency encryption panel. The line he was about to open was one he had sworn never to use unless absolutely necessary.

// In the echoes of the forgotten, the past calls to those who listen. //

The voice on the other end was calm. Measured. Expecting.

"You wouldn't be calling if it wasn't important."

Caspian swallowed. He hadn't felt true fear in years. But this—this was something deeper.

A breath. Not shock. Not confusion.

A longer pause. Then, a shift in tone.

"Contained subject. Full essence analysis. System response was... anomalous."

Not the silence of confusion, but of calculation.

Caspian closed his eyes. He had spent years thinking the old records were exaggerated. That the whispers of things that should not be were merely that—whispers.

The silence stretched this time, heavy and absolute. When the voice returned, it was quieter. More careful.

"Purged the data. Shut down the system before it could finalize the analysis."

"Good. Make sure there are no backups."

Caspian's grip on the console tightened.

The words carried weight. A warning.

A soft hum. As if the person on the other end was contemplating something vast.

Chapter 8 :The Machine Hesitated